Penguins Like Salmon, Too - page 4

Springtime Brings New Community Events

May 10, 2004

By
Dee-Ann LeBlanc

Steve Hemminger, a Senior Staff Engineer with the Open Source
Development Lab (OSDL), joined us as well to talk about the 2.6 kernel.
Many, many articles have been written on this topic already, so this
will just be a brief summary of the most interesting points.

For one
thing, as Hemminger was explaining what the OSDL is, he gave the story
of how the whole "center of gravity for Linux" catch-phrase came about.
Apparently someone from Microsoft said in an interview somewhere that
there was no center of gravity for Linux, that basically we were too
scattered. Someone at OSDL's head office knew a great opportunity when
they heard one!

Some of the major improvements from the 2.4 stream to the 2.6 stream
include support for sixteen and more CPUs, the ability to configure the
kernel to be pre-emptible (for real-time performance), better power
saving features on laptops (though these still need work), and features
for studio level sound processing.

Hyperthreading has been enhanced, as
has NFS, networking for very large networks, support for more than 64GB
of RAM, I/O scheduling for streaming media and databases, and an
"embedded profile" to make life easier for embedded Linux developers.
Hemminger warned that we should prepare to see the more badly-written
benchmarks claim that the new kernel is slower, since interactivity
takes precedence over compute-intensive tasks in a pre-emptible kernel,
and the less well-written benchmarks test only the computational tasks.

The 2.7 kernel stream will likely be kicked off in Ottawa at the annual
Linux Symposium this summer.
Topics he expects to hear addressed there include asynchronous I/O for
files, hyperthreading schedulers built to scale such that they can
survive Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDOSs), support for
larger drive arrays, and enhanced disk I/O schedulers.

When it comes to OSDL in the immediate future, Hemminger
said that they are setting up Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for
security, networking, storage, and so on, that are open to all rather
than just official OSDL members. Those who have a serious interest in
these topics might want to check out these SIGs.

Linux Security with SSH

Bryan Hatch, the author of "Hacking Linux Exposed," presented a talk on the ins and outs of
SSH. He began with best practices and some of the basics such as
pubkeys, and then turned to more advanced topics like adding
restrictions to your keys, to what commands can be run through an SSH
connection by location, assigning a specific command to run when an SSH
connection is attempted that matches certain rules (rather than logging
the person in), and other really cool SSH features that most people
aren't aware of. He also pointed out a number of scripts to further
enhance things that he wrote, himself.

Trying to break down what we learned in this seminar would take an
article by itself. Suffice it to say that this material is no doubt
covered in his book, and on his site.

Linuxfest Northwest was well worth attending, even for those of us who
had to leave at 6:30 am to make the drive down in time. Here's hoping for
us locals that this second annual fest will continue to pick up
momentum. It was nice to attend a conference without having to get on a
plane!